FILTRATION: A Novel Strategy to Coach, Mentor and Educate

Filtration (Reverse Osmosis) A Novel Way to Coach, Mentor and Educate

We often speak of coaching or mentoring a person to hone his skills, knowledge and behaviour that can enable him to excel in his life.

The most common way of coaching, mentoring or educating a person through discussions and often through discussion on how to improve his ability to achieve his life’s objectives. This form of coaching is similar to the process of osmosis in which, the knowledge and experience of the coach, mentor or educator assesses or evaluates the ability of the mentee or the learner and directly guides him through discussion on how he can develop and enhance his capability to excel in managing and executing his responsibilities.

This is followed by regular appraisals and assessment of his performance to further guide him in his course of achieving his objectives. This is a diagnostic way of mentoring or educating a mentee or a learner.

The filtration method of mentoring is like a reverse osmosis process, the mentee derives the methods of achieving his objectives viz. learning or excelling in his life and career. The mentor guides the mentee in Socratic Method by questioning suggesting and helping the mentee to analyze and validate the strategy he devises to achieve his objective. The mentee or the learner takes the initiative of defining the objective he wants to achieve. For instance, the mentee is asked to create a poster of what he wants to achieve in life and a mentee may then create a poster like:

The mentor can be the parent too; may ask the mentee how he would like make his life an inspiring one. The mentor may also ask the mentee to identify his passion, talent, and capabilities in terms of his knowledge, skill and aptitude and set his objectives for himself and channelize his passion to achieve his life’s objective. Mentor can explain that the poster is the life’s objective, and ask the mentee to draft a plan or strategy of how to achieve it. The mentor can then orient to the mentee to some of the tools like mind mapping preparing a timeline to draft a strategy and plan to achieve the objectives.

Mentor then asks the mentee to explain his draft strategy and then further discusses with the mentee  the strategy as per the timeline the mentee has devised, mentor further asks for information on how the mentee plans to enhance the capabilities, organize the resources he needs. The mentor can even assess mentee's approach and strategy in achieving his objectives or goals and use the formal and informal assessment to enable mentee to revise and refine his strategy.

Ask the mentee to graphically depict his 'Creative Thinking' (an effective way  to approach risk and challenges the mentee may face in achieving his goals) in the form of a poster, where he may consider himself a butterfly or a bee or a squirrel or even as a merchant, office manager planning and organizing for achieving his objective, he can creatively depict his experience in the form of a poster, one like this:

This will help the mentor gauges the mentee’s approach and attitude to channelize his effort and provides necessary reference and inputs to plan and devise his plan to implement his strategy by developing a Gantt chart, a planner, or a scheduler as the guidelines to implement the plan. The flight of imagination and creativity makes the coaching session interesting leading to more animated discussion between the mentor and mentee.

Post confirming the plan to implement the strategy, the mentor can ask the mentee about the challenges he can face in executing his plan. He can again ask the mentee to let his creative juices flow and create posters of the internal and external challenges he can face while implementing them and how he may try to overcome them. The mentee has to be creative with a positive sense of humour and may create a poster like this on meeting with internal challenge that can help mentee to overcome any set-backs in achieving his set goals:

With a positive sense of humour, he can create a poster. Following is a sample poster:

This helps the mentor to get an insight into the mentee’s behavioural approach to life, work and the difficulties linked to them. The mentor then, through queries guide the mentee to do a reality check of the facts vis-a-vis the assumptions made in devising the strategy.

On this note, the mentee can devise a strategy and plan to manage the challenges or difficulties, even the unforeseen ones he may face in achieving his objective, be it functional, career related or a learning objective. This he then presents to the mentor to whet, consolidate and devise a self check mechanism in the form of the scheduler that can help the mentee to be aware of any point may not be able to execute the step he has planned to. The scheduler will also have the means planned by the mentee to overcome the difficulty.

Through the filtration method of supervising, mentoring and educating, the mentee or the learner devise their own strategy, plan along with checks and controls to achieve their functional, career and even personal development objectives. This method can be beneficially used by the parents, guardians, supervisors, managers, coach and mentors.

Finally, the mentor can ask the mentee to narrate his inspiring success story of achieving his objective and the lessons learnt or experienced gained. To even showcase any innovative solution he devised to overcome any unique challenge that he may have faced in while trying to achieve his objective.

Suggested:

•  A teacher or educator can use this method to guide a learner in preparing for and doing an assignment viz. essay writing, project, or even learning any discipline/subject

• A parent or guardian can use this method to guide his ward to set and achieve life’s goals while achieving the primary objective of personality development

• A manager or supervisor or even an executive can use this method to achieve functional objective

• A coach, mentor, or even soft skills or technical facilitator/trainer can use this method to develop or hone the mentee’s capabilities in the form of knowledge, skill and behaviour

• Social workers too can beneficially use this method to achieve their objective of social development

 
 Link to original document: 

https://www.scribd.com/doc/293413375/Filteration-A-Novel-Way-to-Mentor-and-Educate-pdf